Personal Stories: A History of Chinese in America

Award-winning filmmaker Nancy M. Tong and cultural critic Ang Sze Wei will co-present a talk on the history of Chinese in America. This history will come to life on screen in the form of seven video segments written by prominent Chinese American authors and playwrights. The videos are currently installed at the newly-opened Museum of Chinese in America in New York. Each video highlights early Chinese American immigrant life and how U.S discriminatory laws shaped these personal stories. The speakers will explain the creative process that went into producing these clips, and how they were historically important and continue to resonate in the current times.

Nancy Tong has been making documentaries for over 30 years, and her work has been screened at international film festivals and broadcast on HBO, PBS, and European TV stations. She currently teaches documentary film history and production at the University of Hong Kong and is based in New York.

Sze Wei Ang teaches globalization, literary ethics, and the intersections of history and fiction at the University of Hong Kong. She was previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA and received her doctorate from Cornell University.

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